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Sirens and sleigh-bells are the
dramatic pulse behind Andrew Panton's epic new staging of C.S. Lewis'
Christian fantasia, adapted here by Theresa Heskins in a version
given a fresh breath of life with new songs by Claire McKenzie and
Scott Gilmour. The sirens accompany the story's four child heroes'
escape to the country where they spend the war exploring the
cavernous house where an eccentric professor lives. The sleigh-bells
usher in the far darker presence of the White Witch who rules Narnia
by force, decreeing it to remain forever winter, but without a hint
of Christmas.
But there are prophecies to be
fulfilled, and Peter, Susan, Lucy and Edmund are key players in all
this, even as the ice slowly melts to signal the coming of Aslan,
played by Ben Onwukwe as a dread-locked lord of all goodness.

Panton's production is an impressive
feat of theatrical light and shade from the off, as the siblings
enter the wardrobe of …

It was a poet who gifted the name to
Boots For Dancing, the critically neglected Edinburgh-sired agit-Funk
auteurs led by vocalist 'Dancing' Dave Carson during Post-Punk's
first flourish between 1979 and 1982. The phrase was introduced into
the lexicon by way of an off-the-cuff counterpoint to another band's
three-word melding of socio-cultural tropes. Such tropes were forged
in the heat of a generation's existential disaffection in late 1970's
Thatcher's Britain. They also tapped into everything Boots For
Dancing were about.

Here was a name that implied a Doc
Marten buffed youth club gang cutting loose from the working week and
letting off their collective tension on the floor. There was a sense
of pride too in such a mass ritual, where sartorial elegance and
cutting a dash was as much a part of the experience as the moves
themselves. Looking good, feeling better was an unspoken mantra. It
came with a package, that understand music was a matter of life…

Responses to the ongoing refugee crisis
have been many, but Turner Prize winning artist and musician Martin
Creed's is probably the pithiest statement to date. Consisting of a
AA-side free download single with accompanying videos released this
weekend, Let Them In and Border Control form a new body of
audiovisual work that is as short and as sharp as the miniatures on
Creed's Love To You and Mind Trap albums.

Both songs are meticulously structured
in keeping with Creed's forensically patterned canon. The
self-explanatory Let Them In offers up a vocal arrangement that gives
a superficial nod to the Beatles' All You Need Is Love by way of
REM's Shiny Happy People, while its even briefer flipside is a
dry-as-a-bone minimalist word game that resembles protest poems of
counter cultures past. Heard together, these two minutes and five
seconds of DIY pop sound like fractured nursery rhyme anthems to sing
along to in a way that might just help change the world.

Turning thirty was a bigger deal than
it should've been for Carla Easton, singer, song-writer and driving
force behind all-female quartet, Teen Canteen. Instead of either
trying to ignore such a benchmark or else drown the sorrows of her
twenties last hurrah, Easton decided to get pro-active. Roping in an
A-Team of musical friends including Eugene Kelly of The Vaselines,
Duglas T Stewart of the BMX Bandits and Norman Blake of Teenage
Fanclub, Easton arranged a night designed to celebrate girl groups
while raising funds for Scottish Women's Aid, and The Girl Effect was
duly born.

Those attending the sold out show at
Edinburgh's Summerhall venue in May this year in association with the
arts centre's in-house promoters, Nothing Ever Happens Here, saw some
fourteen acts play two songs apiece by female artists of their
choice. These ranged from covers of classic 1960s pop from the likes
of Martha Reeves and The Ronettes through to more recent chart
botherers such as Destiny…

Jessica Hardwick could be forgiven for
wanting to let her hair down. The Borders born actress has barely had
a breather since she graduated from the Royal Conservatoire of
Scotland in 2013 to join the Citizens Theatre
as one of the company's acting interns for that year. Her new tenure
threw her in at the deep end for her first professional role as Sonya
in Dominic Hill's epic staging of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment
adapted by Chris Hannan. This was followed with Hardwick playing the
maid, Christine, in Hill's equally intense staging of August
Strindberg's play, Miss Julie, as adapted by Zinnie Harris.

For both of these roles Hardwick was
awarded playwright John Byrne's inaugural
Billy award, named in honour of actor Billy
McColl and introduced to support the best in rising young talent.
Hardwick was subsequently cast in Byrne's
take on Chekhov's Three Sisters at the the Tron Theatre, where she
also performed with Stellar Quines in Lucy Porter'…

Reid Gallery, Reid Building, Glasgow School
of Art until December 12th"The things people think about
Africa," says the down to earth and very English sounding voice
of Grace Ndiritu in her video piece, Raiders of the Lost Ark (2015),
at one point, "and they never go to Africa. Fuckin' Hell,
man."

Filmed on location at the Wusha Mikel Church in
Ethiopia and the Samyeling Tibetan Monastery, Raiders of the Lost
Ark's prosaic observation sums up everything Ndiritu's vast catalogue
of film and video works, paintings, photographs and performances are
about. Raised in Britain and with a Kenyan heritage, as Ndiritu
bridges the shadow line of cultural assimilation, appropriation and
fetishisation of the exotic, a transformative visual poetry emerges
that fuses shamanic ceremonial with trash pop notions of ethno-delic
glam chic and ancient future ritual.

This is made most
explicit in Holotropic Breathing for the Masses (2015), a film of
what in September of this y…

As constitutional crises go, the death
of the Queen and subsequent accession of Prince Charles in his
mother's wake might well rock the establishment where they are both
figureheads. And if the man who would be king breached royal protocol
and started tasking charge of matters of state, who knows how things
might turn out?
This is the starting point for Mike
Bartlett's contemporary history epic, which begins in this UK tour of
Rupert Goold's Almeida Theatre production
with a solemn candlelit requiem as the cast process into a
brick-lined semi-circular crypt that doubles up as the bowels of
Buckingham Palace. Here we meet Charles and his tabloid-friendly
brood: a dutiful William, a ruthlessly ambitious Kate and a
hopelessly hapless Harry, who falls for Jess, a St Martin's art
school girl who introduces him to some real common people. Charles,
meanwhile, must confront old ghosts even as he squares up to a
reactionary government.

Fans of long-running cult American
fantasy series Supernatural will have spotted a new arrival in its
tenth season, currently airing on E4 in the UK. The red-haired woman
called Rowena may not have said anything during her first appearance
sitting in her hotel room at the end of the episode, Soul Survivor,
which aired last month. The two men hanging from the ceiling above
her impaled by stakes, however, spoke volumes about her demonic
intent.

As fans of the show will find out when
Rowena makes her presence fully felt in the season's eighth episode,
Girls, Girls, Girls, on November 25th, what turns out to
be a 400 year old matriarch with some very important progeny also
speaks with a Falkirk accent. This comes in the form of thirty-six
year old actress Ruth Connell, who was last seen on these shores
playing Mrs Beaver in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe at the
Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh back in 2008, but who now seems to
have entered an even more fantastical realm.

When you've got nothing, you've got
nothing to lose, as some street-smart sage once wrote. So it goes for
Malky, the Leith Walk wag at the heart of Mikey Burnett's
play as he lets rip over one tragi-comic night sparring with his
flat-mate Frank in the bathroom. When Malky bursts in, he's lost his
last pound on a sure fire winner that fell at the first, the dole
have stopped his money, and, most crucially, the love of his life has
dumped him to the point of almost having to get a restraining order
out on him.
What follows over the next fifty
minutes is a quickfire riot of the sort of twisted desperado logic
which initially comes on like a post Trainspotting flat-sharing
sit-com. Things take a more serious turn in Iain Davie's production
for the Napier University sired Trig Point Theatre
company, as such exchanges point up just how much those backed into a
corner by economic and emotional poverty can end up clutching at any
st…

When Brix Smith Start picked up a
guitar for the first time in fifteen years, it was an understandably
emotional experience. Smith Start, after all, is a survivor of not
just one, but two stints as guitarist with legendary punk-sired
outsiders, The Fall. She was also married for six years
to this most truculent of bands'
mercurial vocalist and leader throughout almost forty years,
thirty-odd albums and countless ex members, Mark E Smith.

Following such service above and beyond
musical duty, Smith Start eventually moved into a career in fashion,
first running a chain of boutiques with her current husband, Philip
Start, then on TV alongside Gok Wan on Gok's Fashion Fix.

Once she started playing guitar again,
however, there was no turning back, and the result of this renewed
love affair is Brix and The Extricated, a band she fronts with no
less than three former Fall members, including bassist Steve Hanley
and his drummer brother Paul, who first played with The Fall aged
fift…

One could be forgiven for presuming the
loneliness of the long-distance vacuum cleaner salesman to not
exactly be the most dynamic raw material for top-drawer adventure
yarns. This didn't stop Graham Greene, however, whose 1958 pastiche
of very British spy stories was filmed a year later by Carol Reed.
Clive Francis' stage version dates from 2007, and in Richard Baron's
new production mines an ongoing vogue for doing pocket-sized modern
classics with one eyebrow archly raised.
Baron's cast of four open the show with
a nod to Greene's own tenure in the spying
game as each shares the narration between them to unveil the
fast-moving story concerning Jim Wormold, the down-at-heel salesman
who's been ditched by his wife for an American and left in Cuba with
his precocious teenage daughter Milly in tow. Inexplicably enlisted
by the London secret service to keep an eye on any nefarious
activities Johnny Foreigner might be getting …

One fears for the worst when a
curiously past-it looking Algernon drops a cue in the opening scene
of Oscar Wilde's evergreen rom-com
concerning mistaken identity amongst courting couples who flit and
flirt between town and country. Within seconds, however, it becomes
clear that Lucy Bailey's touring production is throwing the audience
a googly. This comes in the form of the Bunbury Company of Players,
the fictitious home counties am-dram group used as a framing device
to justify Bailey's casting of older actors in roles usually reserved
for ingenues.
As scripted by Simon Brett, the Bunbury
Players have been revisiting Earnest since their first production of
the play in 1970, so it is now the preserve of the company's elder
statesmen and women rather than starlets. While the rehearsal room
role-call of offstage affairs, reluctant butlers and cricketing
distractions add an extra layer of hammed-up identity crises, they
aren…

About Me

Coffee-Table Notes is the online archive of Neil Cooper. Neil is an arts writer and critic based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Neil currently writes for The Herald, Product, Scottish Art News, Bella Caledonia & The List. He has contributed chapters to The Suspect Culture Book (Oberon), Dear Green Sounds: Glasgow's Music Through Time and Buildings (Waverley) & Scotland 2021 (Eklesia), & co-edited a special Arts and Human Rights edition of the Journal of Arts & Communities (Intellect). Neil has written for A-N, The Quietus, Map. Line, The Wire, Plan B, The Arts Journal, The Times, The Independent, Independent on Sunday, The Scotsman, Sunday Herald, Scotland on Sunday, Sunday Times (Scotland), Scottish Daily Mail, Edinburgh Evening News, Is This Music? & Time Out Edinburgh Guide. He has written essays for Suspect Culture theatre company, Alt. Gallery, Newcastle, Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, Berwick upon Tweed Film and Media Arts Festival & Ortonandon. Neil has appeared on radio and TV, has provided programme essays for John Good and Co, & has lectured in arts journalism at Napier University, Edinburgh.